When the Anomalies End
Coniferous forest campsite.
Alice and Pina had lit a fire and sat quietly warming themselves by it.
Pina was shivering hard from the cold, holding her hands out toward the flames.
"Uuuugh…"
They say humans are animals of adaptation. But in extreme cold, that saying seemed to lose all meaning.
They were suffering without even a chance to adapt. Whenever snow fell or a cutting wind blew, they trudged along with snow piled on their heads, drowning in an unmanageable sense of helplessness.
Alice gently brushed the snow from Pina's hair.
"Cold?"
"Yeees…"
Pina sniffled.
Alice sniffled along with her and held herself closer to the campfire.
Without sprinkling Thermal Powder, they suffered the cold this badly.
But if they kept relying on Thermal Powder alone, they'd never adapt to the cold and would become dependent on the powder entirely.
Then how would that be any different from a drug?
Of course, if things got too hard she intended to use the Thermal Powder — but for now, she figured she'd conserve the powder and adapt at the same time.
Pina hugged her knees tightly and grumbled.
"I want to go back to Antico~."
Alice felt the same way.
She'd always been annoyed by how muggy it was there, but that already felt like ancient history. Before she knew it, she was missing Antico.
If she went back to Antico now, she was confident she could live nice and warm.
But she couldn't keep thinking pessimistically.
Alice tried to look at the world as positively as she could.
"Still, it's kind of pretty, isn't it?"
She flexed her liberal-arts sensibilities.
The coniferous forest, still green even in the depths of winter. A snow country forever blanketed white by heavy snowfall. The black-and-white contrast of sky and earth divided by the horizon. And above it all, a festival of bright starlight floating white.
Wasn't it beautiful?
"We've seen too much of it out here."
"Yeah, fair point."
Well, even beauty lost its charm after the first couple of times.
When the same moment kept repeating, whatever remaining impression was bound to fade.
"Not that I'm saying it's bad or anything."
Pina blew a long breath of white air and warmed her hands.
Alice also hunched against the chill.
Then she ran both hands over her dry face once, squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again.
Nine months had already passed, and she was still inside this winter landscape.
She hadn't found any trace of Neveumano. Neveterde's cry — whether it had been a coincidence that one time — never rang out again.
If only Neveterde would cry out one more time.
But the world never worked that easily.
"Should we sprinkle some now?"
"Yeees."
Pina rummaged through her bag.
She pulled out the bundle of Thermal Powder and flung it over her own body and Alice's. Where it touched their skin, it melted naturally and radiated a strangely warm heat.
Warmed up, Pina rubbed her hands together with a drowsy expression.
"Hiyah, I feel alive again~."
"Cold really is the worst."
"Right?"
They zoned out staring at the fire in the warmth.
Watching the occasional rising sparks was something to do when sleep wouldn't come.
Nature's sounds prowled around their ears.
The conifers swayed in the wind, rubbing against each other with soft scrapes. From time to time, a monster's cry drifted from far away, carrying a rather chilling tone.
Those sounds didn't particularly matter. If a monster appeared in front of them, they'd just kill it.
Now that her body was warm, Alice pulled out her dual blades.
And slowly sharpened the edges with a whetstone.
Shring— shring—.
She checked for any dull spots and continued the repetitive motion without much thought.
The sound of steel being scraped was clearer than any other noise.
Listening quietly, Pina asked her.
"When do you think the Anomalies will end?"
"Who knows?"
Alice pretended not to know.
After thinking carefully, Pina gazed at the campfire and said,
"When time goes back to normal… what happens to you, Alice-nim?"
At Pina's question, the first thing that rose in Alice's mind was the scenery of her old world.
A bland life among concrete. The loneliness felt in the middle of a city. The awkwardness in elevators. The whispers of people on the street. The noisy blaring of car horns.
Those things crawled up slowly from the far side of her memory.
But she didn't particularly miss them.
Then she pictured her family among it all.
It was already hard even to recall their faces. With her nonexistent drawing skills, she had no confidence she could preserve their faces either.
What would happen to her? As she was now, she couldn't even begin to think about the ending.
Pina carefully continued her question.
"Will you… go back to the original time?"
At the trembling voice, Alice looked at Pina.
Her cheeks, flushed red from the cold, were very round. Her hair, mussed from long exploration, stood out. White snow was mixed here and there through her curly brown long hair. She looked like a small animal mid-winter hibernation.
That girl was meeting Alice's eyes with slightly moist pupils.
Alice spoke her thoughts.
"Probably."
She didn't particularly want to, but she said it calmly.
"I'm an uninvited guest in this world, after all. When the Anomalies end, I'll disappear too."
All of this had happened because of Miteraos.
The moment she killed that thing, every misaligned gear would return to its place.
Everyone would go back to where they originally belonged.
All of them…
Her throat felt like it was burning.
In extreme thirst, she pulled out her canteen and swallowed water.
"I'd be sad if Alice-nim disappeared."
Pina curled up even tighter.
To Alice's eyes, loneliness seemed to circle around Pina.
It was the same for her.
Alice, too, was being pierced by an unmanageable loneliness.
Maybe she was projecting herself onto Pina.
"Me too."
Alice tapped her feet against the ground — a halfhearted attempt at stamping them.
Even that lost its energy and went limp. Fatigue wrapped her body. Talking about draining subjects made her this powerless. It felt like what she was doing now was something she shouldn't be doing.
Think about it. Even if you go back, nothing's waiting for you! You want to stay in this world, don't you!
She deliberately turned away from that inner voice.
She had things she had to do.
Work she'd been entrusted with, asked to do. Work she could finish.
She covered up her true feelings.
In a life where she'd never accomplished anything, just being able to do something was enough for her.
Thinking that, her heart lightened a little again.
A story that wasn't fun and was endlessly heavy wasn't fun no matter how much you thought about it. There was nothing enjoyable about it at all.
So it was better to live as brightly as she could.
"Still, I'll see it through to the end."
Alice smiled small.
"Who knows? Even after the Anomalies end, I might still be here."
She stood up and dusted off her rear.
"And we decided we'd try other work besides hunting, didn't we?"
"Alice-nim…"
"Of course, I'll keep doing hunter work too."
Pina looked at her with moved eyes.
Alice shrugged and undid the bindings on her bag and sleeping bag.
"So let's hang in there and work hard tomorrow too."
She tossed the sleeping bag to Pina with a flick.
Pina stretched out both hands, caught the rolled-up sleeping bag, and nodded.
"Okay!"
"Mm, good."
The atmosphere around the campfire changed.
They spread their sleeping bags on the ground, climbed inside, and warmed their bodies.
And escaping the heavy conversation, they talked about something a bit more lively.
"What kind of work should we do when we go back? If it's Alice-nim, maybe something like an actor in the capital's theater troupe… ah, wait, no."
"I'm good at acting."
"I really don't think Alice-nim can act. Facial expressions and all…"
"Watch closely."
"…Whoa, that expression just now was genuinely scary. Full of madness?"
"I was smiling."
"Yeees~?"
"…"
"…S-sorry. It was really scary, though."
Alice found her composure.
Because something about her heart felt unburdened.
───!!
Her heart grew even freer as she hunted monsters.
That said, it wasn't as if she was dumping all her accumulated stress onto the monsters.
She could proudly declare she absolutely never did that.
Anyway, she didn't.
She raised her short— no, dual blades.
───GUUHHH!!!
Pinopigna.
A tree-like monster that lived in the coniferous forest.
This bastard stood still pretending to be a tree, then snagged its prey with tentacle-like forelegs — a dirty little creature.
Its outer shell was similar to wood, so there was a certain satisfaction in carving it down by hand.
Like doing woodcraft, maybe.
Alice raised her dual blades.
Right hand in a standard grip, left hand in a reverse grip.
Pressing her thumbs firmly against the hilts, she stepped forward with force.
Swift
Dual blades were light weapons by nature, making evasion easy — and you could attack while evading at the same time.
Whoosh!
A Pinopigna's foreleg came flying.
Taking a clean hit would be more than enough to send you flying limply.
She ducked under the foreleg, spun her body once, and fed it the blade.
The outer shell scraped and sprayed outward.
Pinopigna wasn't a difficult opponent.
At best a Low-grade monster. She could easily take it down with dual blades and Essence ground from Mid-grade monsters.
She clashed the two swords together and swept the edges against each other as if honing them.
Soon a blue coating rose from the Sabeltiger Essence and wrapped both blades.
Frost Blade
The edges grew sharper than before.
She cut clean through the Pinopigna's foreleg as it came at her again.
"Hup."
She held her breath and spun the dual blade in her left hand half a turn back to a standard grip.
The dual blades' specialty was continuous strikes that rarely broke rhythm.
Sword Rush
She thrust her arms forward.
Left arm, then right arm, then left again.
If she couldn't pierce the Pinopigna's carapace the flow would have broken, but the blades wrapped in Frost Blade smoothly punched through the tree bark again and again.
───UUUHH……
Soon the Pinopigna collapsed limply.
Dark red fluid dripped from the holes the swords had made — a somewhat brutal sight.
Pina, approaching after the fight ended, saw the Pinopigna's corpse and gagged.
"Alice-nim, uugh…"
Alice smirked at that Pina.
With dual blades, it had at least kept its original form.
If it had been the greatsword, she'd have just split it in half from the head down and made it into a pretty planaria.
With a longsword, she probably would have diced the body into a neat square grid, wouldn't she?
She looked down at the Pinopigna's carcass.
Holes were punched all over its body, warming the ground with blood.
"…Yeah, it's a little much."
"Y-you're way too heavy-handed."
"This is normal."
Alice shrugged.
Was there anything cruel about hunting monsters?
She'd just gone all out — all out.
Wasn't the Pinopigna just too weak to take her full power?
…She tried showing off once.
"Still, no traces in sight."
"Yeah."
They searched here and there for monster tracks, but only small fry like this turned up — no sign of a Snow Woman or Yeti whatsoever.
Alice wiped the blood from her dual blades with a dry cloth.
Just where were they and what were they doing?
Making a second generation together or something?
Their sizes were way too different for that…
She let out a short sigh and folded the cloth.
"…We're running low on supplies soon."
"Yes, it's time to head back."
No harvest.
Apparently the coniferous forest wasn't where the Yeti was.
They clearly needed to expand their range of activity a bit more.
"…Ah, right."
Something suddenly occurred to her and she let out a sound.
Pina tilted her head and asked.
"What is it?"
"Adelaide asked me to bring meat."
"…Cervonayo meat?"
"Yeah. I'd forgotten."
She'd almost gone back empty-handed.
Alice sheathed her dual blades again and dusted off her hands.
Then she pointed at the Pinopigna and said,
"For this expedition, let's just butcher this and go."
"Okaaay~."
Pina pulled out her tanning knife.
That was when it happened.
───♬~♩~.
From somewhere, a pleasant cry rang out.
───AAAaaa!!!
───GRRRrraaa!!!!!
Starting with that sweet tone, the roars of thoroughly excited monsters rang out one after another.
Pina and Alice looked at each other at the same time.
"…This is."
"That sound again."
Soon Pina looked around, frowning.
"Where was it…?"
A situation where the location was hard to pin down.
Alice said to Pina,
"Let's go find it."
"Huh? How?"
Pina blinked.
Just as she was about to answer, a sharp sense told her something was approaching this place.
"Wait."
She grabbed Pina's body and crouched as low as possible behind a tree.
"Eek-?"
Pina's eyes went wide as she looked at Alice.
Alice brought her index finger to Pina's lips.
Thud- thud-.
Right after, behind their backs, the heavy sound of a monster passing by rang out.
Alice peeked her head out.
The monster was already far away. Only then did she let Pina go.
"…Let's follow it."
"Y-yes-."
Pina answered in a fluster.
Leaving the Pinopigna's carcass behind, they decided to chase the monster bewitched by the Snow Woman's voice.